ARTICLES ABOUT SAM PERKINS BY DATE - PAGE 3

Let's embalm the Lakers before the prevailing wind carries the odor to Chicago. The Lakers are as dead as Byron Scott's jump shot. Tidy up that parade route. In fact, when the Bulls take a 16-point lead into the fourth quarter of Sunday's game, someone asks me which street the Bulls` victory parade will be on. "They always use La Salle," I say. "Always?" He had me there. How easy this is to get used to, this championship feeling, as if it has happened already and as if it happens often.

The question had been asked over and over, and finally Sam Perkins had to concede defeat. He didn`t have an answer to why the Bulls were beating the Lakers so decisively on the boards. "I don`t know what the reason is," the Los Angeles forward said. "If I did, I`d have been doing it the last two games." The boards proved to be the glaring difference in Game 3. The Lakers outplayed the Bulls in virtually every other category but were outrebounded 46-29. The Bulls got second, third and sometimes even fourth shots.

He slept well Friday night, Byron Scott insisted. He did not, he claimed, chase Michael Jordan through his dreams. Nor did his miserable performance (0 for 8, zero points) in Game 3 haunt him in some horrifying nightmare. He simply awoke at 6, he said, sat up in bed and thought, "All right. I`m over it." "I was disappointed," Scott explained Saturday afternoon. "Not in the way I played, but what I contributed on offense. I just have to get it out of my head and get ready for Sunday."

Mychal Thompson responds with a wisecrack when asked about his body and how, at age 36, it is holding up. Part of that is habit. And part might be because the Lakers` veteran figures it's a lot easier that way. Easier to laugh and roll with his current circumstances than to whine about something he can`t possibly change. "In life, in general, people get phased out at a certain age because people think they can`t do their jobs anymore," Thompson says. "In sports, if you`re in you`re late 30s, they think you can`t run up and down the floor.

They don`t come much bigger than this one for the Bulls. This is a basketball game that's looking down on the Sears Tower. If this game went swimming in Loch Ness, the monster would get out. How big is Game 2 of the National Basketball Association Finals Wednesday in the Stadium, Michael Jordan? "The season is right now," Jordan said. "We know we`ve got to win. Everything has been leading up to right now. We`ve had important games, like last year in Detroit (in the Eastern Conference finals)

He often lost himself in that sweet reverie so common among the young. He would be at the playground, on one of those unforgiving courts that mottle his native Brooklyn. And with a most important game on the line, the ball would swing to him, and he would hit the winning shot. "I dreamed about that all the time when I was a kid," Sam Perkins remembers. He was no different than countless other kids on countless other playgrounds, yet even as he grew, this dream still rattled around within him. It is usually abandoned with time and the passing of years, but back in his dark days, those days when he toiled with the Dallas Mavericks, Perkins would often find himself reliving the fantasy of his youth.

The pressure, as the Los Angeles Lakers and just about everyone else knows, is on the Bulls after their Game 1 loss at home in the NBA Finals. "Everyone in the world knows they`ve got to win," Lakers forward James Worthy said of Game 2 Wednesday in the Stadium. "That's the biggest truth of the whole series." And for the Bulls to do so, they know pressure is the answer. "We`re going to have to pick our defense up," said Scottie Pippen at the Bulls` Monday morning practice at the Stadium.

Michael Jordan missed a key free throw down the stretch of a 1989 playoff loss against Cleveland at the Stadium, and almost had to apologize afterward for being human. "Even the greatest golfers in the world miss a putt now and then," he told reporters. Two days later, Jordan followed up with the most memorable shot in Bulls history-the buzzer-beating jumper over Craig Ehlo that carried the team past the Cavaliers and into the second round. No apologies are necessary for being superhuman.

When the Los Angeles Lakers get together for their regular long-distance shooting contests, Sam Perkins never plays. It isn`t that he wouldn`t like to participate in the pre-practice, low-stakes games of "Horse." It's just that until now, he hasn`t been invited by its principal participants, coach Mike Dunleavy, Magic Johnson and Byron Scott. "He's working his way up to that class," Dunleavy said Sunday. "He hasn`t entered yet. But he may want in now." After his game-winning three-pointer with 14 seconds left in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, Perkins may decide to play hard to get. In a play misunderstood in the Lakers` huddle but executed perfectly, Perkins took a feed from Johnson-double-teamed at the time by Michael Jordan and Bill Cartwright-and fired home a shot from just right of the key that would put the Lakers up for good at 92-91.

Power forward: Horace Grant vs. Sam Perkins - Grant has been a brilliant offensive rebounder throughout the playoffs, averaging more than three per game, and has shown an ability to score when getting the ball in the post. He averaged 15 points against the Lakers this season and has scored a steady 12.8-his season average-in the playoffs. Perkins is an adept post-up player, but after having dealt with Charles Oakley and Charles Barkley in the playoffs, Grant should not have trouble with his power moves.